The Destructives (5 page)

The robot rappelled down the cliff face. Under its direction, the students focused their efforts. They found an intact rack. Whoops of joy over the comms. The joy of being alive. Once the rack was retrieved, Dr Easy topped-up the air supply of each suit. The life signs pulsed green and orange.

He kicked up some dust, waiting for the rescue to come. The moonquake had disturbed the dark heart of a crater. He saw what looked like figures under the heavy rocks, their blank faces sheathed in earthlight. He adjusted the magnification on his helmet to inspect the bodies more closely, and saw that although the figures were just slabs of rock, there seemed to be a section of something man-made there: a space helmet with a shattered visor and the empty sleeve of a moonsuit. He leapt into the crater, a slow theatrical leap down into the jagged broken floor. He reached into the shadow and retrieved the torn sleeve. It bore the insignia of the class of ’43. The ruined moonsuit had belonged to one of the original cohort of the University of the Moon, that idealistic first generation lost in a fatal depressurisation of the lunar campus. He tried to free the helmet but it was wedged and he did not want to risk tearing his gloves. The moonsuit must have drifted back to the surface and then been covered over by debris during a moonquake. He poked around expected to find a body, in a state of desiccation, alternatively frozen and cooked by the shift in temperature. But he found nothing.

3

THE LOOP

His quarters contained a bedroom, a living room and a staircase up to his study, a flat-bottomed tulip bulb with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the grey favela of the university spread across the crater floor. Other tulip offices rose out of the favela and up toward the titanium shield, some silvered for privacy, others empty, a few illuminated from within to reveal their occupants.

His office contained a faun-coloured chaise longue, a resting screen, a bookshelf, and a vintage Möbius-strip desk, at which, after showering then dressing in a narrow brown suit, striped shirt, thin vintage red-and-gold tie and pointed brogue boots, he filed a report on the lunar expedition for the office of student well-being. He was interrupted by a message from Professor Pook, drawing his attention to a new appointment, scheduled for the following day. It was a meeting on the Farside campus with Professor Kakkar from the School of Emergences and a consultant called Patricia Maconochie. His next message was an etiquette loop from her. She praised him in the customary manner, emptying stock adjectives all over his work in Intangibles and as a cultural accelerator. He noticed a meta-level to her communication consisting of fleeting smiles, the glint in her eye and meaningful hesitations. There was more to Patricia Maconochie than the usual corporate boilerplate. Her message gave away no details. He inferred that she was a lone agent. A freelancer on the make. An opportunist. He liked her immediately.

Then there was an ouroboros loop from Professor Kakkar. This self-consuming audio loop ordered Theodore to be strictly punctual and to travel without Dr Easy. Nothing unusual about that request; corporate types liked to keep their intellectual property away from the robot. He accepted the meeting request, and decided he would discuss it with Pook in person.

Dr Easy climbed up into the office but did not interrupt Theodore. The robot reclined on the chaise longue, and inspected the supple foil covering the severed edge of its wrist.

“I’m going out,” said Theodore.

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

It had been two weeks since the hike. The day after their return, Theodore had an outburst in the student mart. He swept products off the shelves. Anger coursed through him before he was even aware of it. He had not believed himself capable of such powerful emotion.

Dr Easy had diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The trauma of nearly dying,” explained the robot.

“Or the trauma of you letting me die,” replied Theodore.

The robot had not offered a satisfactory explanation for its actions during the lunar climb; first it had failed to warn the party of the moonquake, and then it had been reluctant to locate intact air supplies within the rock slide.

Theodore corrected his cuffs.

“You should rest,” said Dr Easy.

“The anger caught me by surprise,” said Theodore. “Cause seemed to follow effect. I’ll see it coming next time.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” said Theodore. “I think not. We should spend some time apart.”

He went to see Professor Pook, his line manager, in his office. Pook wore black-framed glasses, his dark hair was flat and neat, his muzzle and upper neck were invariably dark with the beginnings of a beard. He was younger than Theodore by two years yet he was already a professor, due to the success of his long thought
We Are Spent: Fifteen Reasons Why We Should Splice the Human Genome to Create New Consumers.
The Moral Arguments Involved Will Surprise You
. In
Spent
, Pook argued that the accelerators had run out of meaningful innovations and as a consequence, people were sad: or, as he put it, the tapering metrics of positive sentiment among consumers was due to a rise in resistance to the promise of novelty. In
Spent,
Pook argued that
change
– change as a promise, not actual social change – had been so thoroughly mined that humanity had lost faith in it. His evidence came from Novio Magus, where Pook lived among the consumer patients of the asylum malls for months at a time, noting their culture, the loops they clipped, the way they posed for images, the filters they used for their soshul memories, the choco-chuck they ate, the empty wrappers they chose to smooth out and neatly fold; he catalogued their expressions of awe and fear under the vaulted ceiling of the asylum mall; he assembled a taxonomy of yearning – the twelve different ways in which a woman touches a dress on a rack – and ranked the tells of desire. He tracked despair in the asylum malls, anger and hatred in the countless transactions of the ultramarkets, measured inertia and boredom in the demographic reservations, and decided that the answer to the overwhelming evidence that humanity was sick of itself was to loosen legal constraints on splicing the human genome – starting with cats, dogs and jellyfish. The cover of his long thought was a faked loop of a black boy in school uniform, left eye human, right eye cat. Consumers with animal traits would require new product categories. And so life could go on.

We Are Spent
was, in Theodore’s opinion, admirably opportunistic in its scholarship. When the university awarded Pook his professorship, it paid the ultimate compliment a scholar can make to his fellow: they feared him.

“You set a meeting for me with a consultant. Maconochie.”

“At her request. But I want to check that you are up to it. How is your wellbeing? Have you recovered from your hike yet?”

“I had a touch of PTSD. I found myself sweeping products off the shelves in the student mart before I even realised what I was doing.”

“I saw the loop. Interesting.”

“I think it was anger. But I can’t be certain of my own feelings.”

“Your quick thinking saved the lives of your students. Perhaps you are experiencing a feeling of triumph. Have you ever known success?”

“Kind of. I invented a product called beach light. But I wouldn’t describe the feeling as one of triumph.”

“After
Spent
dropped, and I was getting all the acclaim – finally, evidence to marketise human genetic experimentation – I had a day of thrillingly cold happiness. And then I realised that I had merely reached a plateau in terms of success, and a whole new range of peaks lay ahead. I had to recalibrate my goals, seize the opportunity for greater transgression.”

Theodore remembered queuing in the student market. Brands shifting in his peripheral vision, the flickering of their holographic loops reminding him of the loose scree that had rapped against his visor during the moonquake. The next moment, he had found himself trashing a display of virility serums, then stamping upon the racks of artisan gingerbread men with their tiny icing beards; in the brushed stainless steel cabinets, a smeared reflection of his face. Before he began destroying the stock, he was aware of no intention to do it. The only correlative to the impulse that he could think of – and this was a thought that occurred to him mid-act, as he hefted a three litre jar of psychofuel above his head, the top of his skull lifted off, holes drilled in his spine, anger playing him like a flute – was when he was a recidivist in his addictions, and would find himself honking up the grokk without really wanting it.

Loops of Theodore losing it in the mart were eyeballed by the students before he had even stopped losing it.

He noticed that Pook was packing a bag.

“I’m going on a research trip to Novio Magus.”

“Sussex?”

Professor Pook considered for a moment. “I think Sussex is the name of the car park.”

“We used to drop the array over Novio Magus to accelerate its culture.”

“You’ve never been inside, have you? Analytics cannot capture the first hand experience of the asylum mall. To inhabit art twenty-four-seven. It’s magical. During my last research trip, I drank every night in a bar called Everyone Likes Me and ate silver love glumph from a tub noon and night.”

“What’s your brief?”

“Group suicide. Thirty-five people killed themselves with poisoned Oof cakes. Oof have commissioned me to find out why they used their cakes to do it. What is the intangible link between Oof and a desire for death? It represents an opportunity for insight into our dark times.”

“A desire for death could be an intensification of addiction.”

“Addiction is my meat and drink. I think that’s why you first piqued my interest. Before you committed yourself to being boring.”

Theodore inspected Pook’s book shelves.

“Be thankful you didn’t know me when I was interesting.”

4

SIXTY-THREE PER CENT FAIL

The far side of the moon was thoroughly pockmarked. Daedelus crater, nearly a hundred kay in diameter, came up through the porthole, and then the pod nudged over the rim and raced low toward the hub of Farside Campus. It reminded him of Vegas in the desert, a city bounded on all sides by a lethal landscape. The skyline here was a spiky array of probes, the great dish of a radio telescope and adjoining cylindrical barrel of an optical telescope.

Alongside the campus, moonbots were constructing the outline of a leviathan: Gulliver perhaps, or Mothra, or an effigy of the loop star Dog Head Girl with her Labrador chops and polka dot skirt. The landing stage had been constructed by mooncrafters out of thousands of pale blocks; it was a bright white cephalopod, buried head first in the rock, with every white tentacle tipped – as the name suggested – by a pod. Low faculty buildings clutched the crater floor like roots.

On disembarkation, a tracked sled took him and the other passengers down into the body of the campus. The atmosphere was muted, the students lean and dour; on the sled, he passed the airlocks of the departments of astrophysics and of biotech, the School of Genetic Engineering, the School of Off-Earth Medicine, the great shipyards of Rocket Science, until he came to a beige bay door marked Emergence Studies, and there the sled waited for him to depart.

Muted lighting in reception, just enough for an empty building. Idly, he inspected various flyers, warnings, notices, passive-aggressive codes of conduct printed out and pinned up on a felt noticeboard. The coffee machine plipped then plopped. Then he heard her approach from down the corridors and through the doors, had time to adjust his cuffs and straighten his tie, correct his hair, before she walked in.

Patricia Maconochie wore executive armour, grey hardfoam mail over a breathable body sheath, carbon fibre gauntlets and sabatons over her boots. Her high rimmed collar could spin out a protective helmet if required. They exchanged pleasantries. He looked for signs of who she might be without the armour. As if answering his thought, she removed her gauntlets. Her nails were enamel white to match her lipstick and she did not wear any rings. Her bone structure was strong and assertive, her way of speaking also. They shook hands, skin on skin.

“Professor Pook recommended you,” she said. “I’ve worked with him on half a dozen occasions. He’s very
insightful
.” She paused before
insightful
, suggesting a silent conspiracy with Theodore concerning other words she could have used.

“But Pook is a generalist and I require a specialist,” she smiled whitely. “Your areas of expertise meet our requirements.”

“Requirements?”

She smiled. “Let’s jump right in.”

Her male assistant politely requested Theodore’s screen, and having placed it in a secure box, rattled back the door of a caged elevator. The three of them rode down in silence. Arriving, they passed through another corridor and came to a thick set of vault doors, also manually operated, requiring the assistant to hunch over a wheel lock and exert considerable effort. The door opened onto a large echoing cavern with a rough damp moonrock ceiling. At the heart of this lunar vault lay the dark outline of a large suburban house.

As they walked closer, low lighting revealed a grey American townhouse with an attic and neo-classical portico, driveway and garage. He became aware of other people working in the shadows at the back of the room behind large banks of antique equipment and cables. Patricia took a set of keys from her armour and together they walked up to the front door, which she unlocked, showing him into an open-plan kitchen and living room. The house was new, and smelt of varnish, sawdust and paint.

“What do you think?” she asked, laying the keys on the breakfast bar.

He tapped the heel of his heavy shoe against the varnished floor.

“Judging from the large cooker hood and hardwood flooring, I would say this house is a new-build, 2009.” He squinted at the piano in the corner, the television screen above the fireplace.